Resumen de Book Review of Naturally Obsessed
Though I spend much of my time in the company of scientists, there are moments in their talk in which the word “puzzle” comes up, and I feel I will never—with some sense of failure—that I will never understand what pulls them to their work. I love stories, not puzzles, and I have never understood the shining look my scientist friends have when talking about them.
So I had one question as I sat down to watch Naturally Obsessed, a one-hour film by Richard and Carole Rifkind: Will I feel it? Will I understand why they must do science? The film, four years in the making, follows three graduate students in the lab of Larry Shapiro at Columbia University Medical Center: Rob, the aging and surly bench monkey who took the long way back to academe; Kilpatrick (“Kil”), the straight arrow with the foot-tapping lawyer fiancee; and goodnatured Gabe, the tech who made the jump to demoralized Ph.D.
student. All three are trying to grow crystals and characterize proteins. As the film opens, none has been successful.
Here is the miracle: After only minutes in their company, I was fidgeting, anxious for them to grow a good crystal, to get a good diffraction pattern, to solve that structure. I was itchy for the students to get back to the lab and grow some more, maybe try some of that pickle juice Rob mentioned. And (to the exclusion, temporarily, of anything else) I needed to get a promising crystal to the synchrotron.
People, Not Things The Rifkinds avoid explaining the science. Although the grad students discuss their work at a fairly high level, describing their molecules and explaining what the crystals are for, there's no softball NOVA section in which the graphics take over and show an array diffracting X-rays. There's no discussion of what a protein is, no word about what a synchrotron does.
In an interview (1), the Rifkinds admit this makes for patches of tough sledding for nonscientists. But their view is that the particulars of the science are not the point of this film.What's important here is how the three students go about their work, and how they deal with perennial failure: in their careers, yes, but also with their families, who see only a sideways drift. Years go by, with days and nights spent sweatily and often unhappily in the lab, and there's no doctorate, no seminal paper, no promise of success.
The audience sees what the students' families do not: the qualities of failure, the headbanging repetitiveness of the work, and the urgency with which the students go about it. And it is genuine, even deranged, urgency.Weride withKil as he drives his “fatties” (fat, good-looking crystals) to Brookhaven National Laboratory, his face taut to the point of looking slightly insane.
The skyline is drab and forgotten across the East River; New York is no grand city. The metropole is Brookhaven.
Between their scientific failures, we follow Rob and Kil through their lives; deft filmmaking gives a lesson in why groundedness is valuable. I'd worried about Rob: he's jumpy, cussed, nearly too old, a man for basements and valves. He is self-advertised last-chance trouble, not a future principal investigator.
Kil sees this, and seems to feel it sharply; he glances at Rob and sees a walking cautionary tale. But in one of the many keen, ordinary moments of the film, we see Rob and his wife on the subway, quiet, and it is clear that whatever may happen in the lab, Rob is his own man outside the lab, and has something deep and worthwhile. He'll be fine. Although Rob's sole stated interest is in characterizing his molecule so he can graduate, we also see that he's doing science, and that young Kil aims to succeed in science, and that these are two very different things.
The movie also shows the workings of academic science in a way that I have never seen before. Rob does, eventually, succeed. And in the moment when Rob has solved his molecule's structure, a mantle of authority drops on him, and he's transformed. The question “Who'd hire this guy?” is answered with, “Anyone: he does magic”, which is confirmed in his firstauthor Science paper. In the thesis defense that follows, we see that Rob, however rough around the edges, can give this kind of talk (surprise!) with the requisite collegiality. So here is a nascent professor, and here is the knife edge whose right side he fell off.
“Our Goal Was Not To Teach Science” While editing the movie, Richard and Carole Rifkind tested it extensively in front of small audiences. Richard, emeritus director of the Sloan-Kettering Institute, says (1):
Our goal was to have enough science so that to the scientific community it seemed authentic. The goal for the lay audience was that the human story was clear: The challenges and the arc of success and failure, and of getting across the emotional drain that it takes to get there.We definitely set up our goal as not to teach science. We didn't expect anyone to watch the film and then go out and do crystallography or even understand what a protein is. We wanted them to see the process.
We wanted to show it for anybody who had ever struggled to do something, for anybody who had ever struggled to leave a mark in whatever role they worked in. [We wanted them] to identify, and have some empathy, with what goes on in science. Not that they could do it, but that they could understand the struggle.
Did the audiences get it? Richard says, “The way I was able to determine that may sound a little silly, but if the lay audience laughed at the same places the scientific audience laughed, I figured they were getting it. And they did.” The film was shot without a sense of how the story might go:
the Rifkinds found promising characters and followed them, hoping a story would emerge. Rob's eventual success became the movie's focus, and Carole says that focus forced cuts in the other students' on-screen development. Even so, Carole says (1), for many audiences:
[I]t was a revelation that there's this emotional experience of doing science, that it's got all these ups and downs, and that human relationships are so important, and that people grow and mature in doing science.
High school teacher Heidi Slatkin agrees (2). Slatkin, daughter of a Brookhaven scientist, teaches English at a public school in New York City. She showed the film last spring to juniors, not to teach science, but as a way of showing how researchers communicated findings in order to change how people view science and scientists. Slatkin's students were prepping for a full-year senior project in which they'll be required to take their own research, scientific or otherwise, and try to communicate it in a way that effects change.
Slatkin said (2):
Some of them really keyed into the idea of failure, repeated failure. We talked about perseverance: how do you keep going when you feel kind of aimless? You have to remind yourself, actively, why you're doing this. And there were real highs and lows, like when the woman leaves Kil because he's not successful enough. They were devastated! The film became a point of reference for the class, both as a standard for storytelling and as a meditation on perseverance.
The movie is not, I think, an unqualified success. The experiment in stepping around science teaching does cause some frustration, and maybe this game is not worth the candle.
Richard explains (1), “We'd learned from the previous film we'd made that the way stories get across is that they're stories about people, not about things.” Fair enough. But Naturally Obsessed is also a story about the things these people are interested in. Their interest told me the molecules and crystals were important, and made me hold my breath along with Kil as we drove to Brookhaven. How good it would have been to have gone the rest of the way with him and understood what the crystal showed.
